The Secret to Getting Exposure on Blogs

Blogs are an advertiser’s dream. Some get millions of readers, and the ones that don’t get millions at least have readers that are highly targeted. Blog readers are typically looking for specific information and are great for getting exposure in a given niche.  If you get a blogger in your niche to write about your company, you’ll be getting your message to people who are already interested in your product.

But winning over bloggers isn’t like convincing a traditional journalist to respond to a press release. There’s a different tactic that you need to take in order to get a blogger to cover your company.

Read on to see how.

The Secret

The secret is surprisingly simple: have personal contact with the blogger in question. Form emails and blanket press releases don’t really work with bloggers. Most blogging niches operate as a community, rather than the top-down approach that newspapers and other traditional media use. That means that bloggers care far more about personal connections than you might otherwise expect. A little friendship goes a long way :-)

The Way to Do It

The first step to making a personal connection with a blogger is to do a little bit of research. Read his blog (more than just the last entry), leave some comments and check out his links and advertisers. When you email your blogger, start out with a mention of something you enjoyed or learned from his blog — and be honest about it. If you don’t like the blog in question, why do you want them talking about you?

Make sure you e-mail the blogger directly. Even if a blog relies on a contact form for anyone trying to get in touch with the blogger, you can still find more direct methods of contact. Try looking him up on other sites, like LinkedIn or Facebook, and seeing if he has an email address listed. You can also send direct messages through these sites.

Avoid using anything that sounds like a form letter. You don’t have to write every email to every blogger you want to contact from scratch, but at least part of your letter will need to be unique — the part talking about why you like a particular blog, for instance. The section where you describe who you are and what you want can be the same in every email, though. Just do what you can to avoid the curse of the form letter.

Low Patience for PR

Many bloggers have a bias against public relations. Some automatically send press releases to their spam folders. Others go so far as to announce annoying public relations attempts on their blog along with negative comments about the company so represented. If you owned a website that receives dozens of form emails every day, you might do the same thing.

But most bloggers will welcome a chatty email and some talk about their blog. If it happens that you add a paragraph or two about yourself and your business, well, that’s just an effort to make a personal connection. And the majority of bloggers started writing in order to make a few new friends.

At the end of the day, you stand to gain a lot just by being friendly.